Poniatowa concentration camp in the town of Poniatowa in occupied Poland, 36 kilometres (22 mi) west of Lublin, was established by the SS in the latter half of 1941 initially, to hold Soviet prisoners of war following Operation Barbarossa. By mid-1942, about 20,000 Soviet POWs had perished there from hunger, disease and executions. It was known at that time as the Stalag 359 Poniatowa. Afterwards, the Stammlager was redesigned an expanded as a concentration camp to provide slave labour supporting the German war effort, with workshops run by the SS Ostindustrie (Osti) on the grounds of the prewar Polish telecommunications equipment factory founded in the late 1930s.[1] Poniatowa became part of the Majdanek concentration camp system of subcamps in the early autumn of 1943.[2] The wholesale massacre of its mostly Jewish workforce took place during the Aktion Erntefest, thus concluding the Operation Reinhard in General Government.[3][4]

Contents

Camp operation1

Aktion Reinhard2

Commemoration3

Notable survivors4

Notes5

Bibliography6

External links7

Camp operation

The first transport of Jews arrived at Poniatowa in October 1942 from Opole where the ghetto liquidation to Sobibor extermination camp was under way. The new barracks were built. By January 1943 there were 1,500 Jews in the camp. In April 1943, during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, about 15,000 more Polish Jews were delivered. For the next six months, they all produced fresh garments for the Wehrmacht. Due to the nature of the work performed, the prisoners were not maltreated like in most other camps. They were allowed to keep children through daycare, wear their own clothes, and retain their personal effects, because the new uniforms made by them, were great morale boosters at the Front. The Jewish tailors and seamstresses of Warsaw worked practically free of charge for the German war profiteer Walter Caspar Többens (Toebbens) who was making a fortune. He was later described as the anti-Schindler.[6] The Jews of Poland were augmented by around 3,000 Slovakian and Austrian Jews (the camp elite) housed separately from the rest.[7]

Aktion Reinhard

After the closure of the nearby Belzecdeath factory in June 1943,[8] head of the Operation Reinhard, ObergruppenführerOdilo Globocnik inspected the Poniatowa facility in August 1943. Gottlieb Hering, the camp commandant,[4] was reprimanded for a total lack of prison discipline. Drastic changes were introduced immediately with daily executions of at least several people. The new crematorium was constructed.[9] From September 1943, the Poniatowa forced labor camp became part of the KL Majdanek concentration camp system of subcamps under Aktion Reinhard, the most deadly phase of the Holocaust.[10]

One of many mass graves of the Nazi German Operation Harvest Festival

During the secretive Operation Harvest Festival ([14]

Commemoration

The first two monuments in memory of the victims of Nazism at Poniatowa were erected in communist Poland at the city centre in 1958 and at the PZT factory in 1959. A different monument, commemorating only the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was unveiled in Poniatowa on 4 November 2008, for the 65 anniversary of their deaths. The inscription in both Polish and English mentions the 14,000 victims of the Aktion Erntefest in Poniatowa from across Poland, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia (without the remaining locations). The monument was unveiled in the presence of the ambassador of Israel to Poland David Peleg, the ambassador of Austria Alfred Langle; Andreas Meitner, minister from the German embassy; Jan Tomaszek, minister from the Czech embassy; Henryka Strojnowska, voivode of Lublin; the town mayor Lilla Stefanek, and many other officials, including Warsaw rabbi and priests.[15]

Notable survivors

Ludwika Fiszer, escaped from the mass grave. Testimony (45 pages) in the book Destruction and Rising published by the General Federation of Jewish Labour in Eretz Israel, Tel Aviv 1946 (digitized by [17]

Israel Shahak, Israeli professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Notes

^Michał Kaźmierczak, Poniatowa unofficial site with links to History and Gallery of photographs. Retrieved April 19, 2013. Location of Poniatowa factory:

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